


even if it throws you to the fire, fire, fire

by alexandrahadley



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/F, abuse tw, alcoholism tw, suicide TW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 13:10:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4788419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexandrahadley/pseuds/alexandrahadley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They meet by chance, with their bodies barely in the 20s, but their souls already old and weary.  They have eighteen days between them - eighteen days where they're just Rose and Luisa, eighteen days where they'll learn things they never knew about themselves, and eighteen days that they will never forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. feel, can't you see there's so much here to feel

**Author's Note:**

> luisa x rose in their twenties | pre-jtv, pre-sinrosetro | where Rose is a wicked tax lawyer who does mandatory pro bono on the side, and Luisa will give you medical advice even when she's a patient
> 
>  
> 
> \--  
> This is for the lovely people who jumped head first into the hell hole that was Luisa x Rose, that first joked about how much lols it would bring if Sin Rostro was actually Sin ROSEtro, and then proceeded to die in angry fandom flames when the horror that was 1x08 happened. It would have had been no fun without you guys.

She can’t say she remembers anything about how she got here. What she does remember, however, is that she can’t move her hand, her head is pounding and when she opens her eyes, she sees red.

Deep, vibrant red.

Red, as in the red of her hair, a curtain around Luisa’s face.

She’s so close, almost too close, but oddly, it makes Luisa smile.

She can’t be older than her twenties, even with the make-up and the tailored white shirt pressed against her fair skin. Not with that look of wonder and ingenuity. Not with that gaze that looks more like curiosity than fear.

That’s how she met her.

She opened her eyes and she was there.

* * *

There’s some yelling that makes everyone stare at them. It’s out of context and mostly hilarious for Luisa and the yelling only abruptly stops when the nurse steps in to say “D”, not “B”.

Luisa snorts a little when she hears the  _ambulance-chaser_  grumble under her breath about how she heard quite something else. Everyone should use the NATO phonetic alphabet when they are running around trying to save lives, she thinks. But saying anything is too hard when she still has all these chemicals flowing through her veins, so instead she collapses back into bed and falls asleep again.

* * *

The tension in her head suggests that whatever the hospital gave her, is not enough. Pulling together her hair in a tight bun, she throws one of those magic little orange pills into her mouth and almost instantly feels better. There’s good reason why she carries them around with her all the time.

Luisa coughs and looks around, grimacing. There aren’t enough nurses around and she hasn’t seen a doctor on rounds since she woke up. Everyone looks worse than her, and she’s already banged up enough that she wants to make sure they stitched her up properly. (She wouldn’t want infections, especially not in her arm.) She hasn’t been in an ordinary ward for ages and she’s surprised they put her here in the first place. She had always thought there weren’t ordinary wards in their hospitals.

Well, at least that means her father doesn’t know yet.

“I guess at least something good came out of all this.” She mutters to herself, staring at the label around her wrist. “JANE DOE”, it says. Like she’s not a person.

Across the ward, she sees the  _ambulance-chaser_. With her  _real_  pro bono and not her. She didn’t know poor people got hot lawyers while she’s stuck with Francis, an old man who still wears his sunglasses on his head like he still has hair. Francis is her father’s friend, and presumably that’s good enough. Father was always like that,  _friends, and family first_. It’d be funny, Luisa sometimes thinks, if Father knows how it was one of his friends who first got her drunk.

(And somehow, she thinks that maybe the blackouts are a good thing. She’s not sure she could bear to remember everything.)

“Sir, can you tell me what happened? Do you remember anything about the car that hit you? Car plate number, make, or model?” Luisa watches her try, and it’s funny because she always thought detectives were in charge of asking such questions. Besides, Luisa knows he won’t remember anything. Not with that bag of painkillers dripping into his body. She’s had that one before and it’s no good.

In fact, it has some pretty ugly side effects.

“Hey, you.” She doesn’t turn around, so Luisa tries again. “You. Ambulance chaser!"

She finally turns around, and would Luisa be terrible if she said she would keep calling her “ambulance chaser” if it meant she’d frown this cutely each time?

Unable to stop herself from smirking, Luisa continues, “look, you’re going to want to maintain some distance-”

Too late.

That’s a sound the hospital’s familiar with, and that’s one less white shirt for the hot lawyer.

* * *

“Puke is no fun.”  
“Understatement of the year.” She’s trying to wash the vomit out of her shirt, and Luisa knows from experience she will never get it out like this. Even if she did clear the stains, the smell? Not a chance.

“Here, take this.” With her one good arm, Luisa throws her spare shirt and slacks at her. She looks up quickly enough to catch it with her hands and Luisa is mildly impressed by that. She always thought that lawyers were too busy spinning stories to keep themselves in shape, or agile. You see, maybe if she knew lawyers other than Francis, lawyers like the hot one in front of her, she wouldn’t be stuck with these stupid stereotypes.

Anyway.

“I always keep an extra set of clothes in my bag. And it doesn’t look like they are letting me out tonight anyway.”

She aims for nonchalant, but she knows she isn’t pulling it off because she’s grinning. Grinning, partly because it’s good to know she was right about that guy puking, and partly because that’s possibly the first time anything good has ever come out of her being in a hospital.

(Or her dealing with puke.)

But the grinning must stop, so Luisa just makes some grumpy noise she’s accustomed to making, and she turns around to leave. It’s then, when she finally gets a response.

“Rose.”  
“What?”  
“My name is Rose.”

Luisa lets out a small laugh and she looks up to see Rose smiling at her. Fondly, almost.

She feels like she should be quoting Shakespeare but that’s way too geeky, even for her, and so she resists.

“I’ll see you around then,  _Rose_.”

* * *

For the last fifteen minutes, she has been desperately squinting beyond her book, pretending that she’s interested in the history of migrants within Miami, when really, what she’s interested in, is Rose.

Is that creepy? To say that she’s  _watching_  this girl that she barely knows, but somehow always captures her attention. Hell, she’s even started spending time in her bed around lunch time, when she’s sure that Rose will be around. Again, creepy.

But you know, she’s cute. And more importantly, she comes to the ward  _everyday_  and talks to 13D like she’s not from a part of the world that is so far detached from these ordinary people, with their coughing of blood and their improper sanitary bags and their blank stares.

Like it’s okay to be torn up and broken apart and they’re still humans worth caring for.

She’s moved two pages in what must be twenty five minutes now, and Luisa is just grinning to herself when she watches how delicate Rose moves. But then she suddenly gets up and crosses the ward, her high heels clicking against the tiled floor, and Luisa panics.

She panics because she has never been good at doing this … you know, dealing with emergencies and sudden decisions and-

“Hey.”

Luisa squints her eyes shut, and tries her best not to move. She feels Rose peel the book out of her hand, and how her bed sinks when Rose sits beside her. She’s suddenly thankful that she’s not hooked up to more machines because damn is she sure that her heart rate is off the charts now.

“I know you’re awake.” A pause, and when Rose runs her fingers briefly across Luisa’s forearm, gently caressing the line where a pale scar runs, her hand jerks in a way that makes Rose laugh. A small, soft laugh, shy and piercing at the same time. “Come on.”

It’s then when Luisa finally opens her eyes, one at a time, resigned. Rose is a lot closer than she originally imagined.

“You’re terrible at faking sleep.”  
“I  _was_  asleep.”  
“I don’t feel like I should be cross-examining the truth out of you.”  
“Fair enough.”

Luisa laughs, and she sits up, shifting to make more space for Rose. Rose shifts in, and Luisa picks out a cup jelly from under her pillow and shoves it into Rose’s hands silently. Rose smiles, and tosses it between both hands quietly. Everyone loves cup jelly, and Luisa is pleased to find out that Rose is no exception.

“So, did you get the puke out of your shirt eventually?”  
“Nope. I threw it out in the end.”  
“It looked expensive.”  
“It was.”  
“Ah.”  
“I will bring your clothes back once I get it washed.”  
“Don’t worry, there’s no hurry. Besides,” Luisa pauses and runs her fingers across the part of her hand where they stuck a needle in, before continuing. “I’ll probably be here for a while.”

Rose’s hands stop moving, and there’s a sadness about it when she finally replies. “Well, thank you anyway.”

She watches as Rose leans over and squeezes her hand just slightly. And then without a word, Rose gets up, and takes her leave.

Luisa doesn’t breathe until she’s sure Rose is out of the ward and when she finally does, she tells herself she must leave too.

When Rose turns up at the ward the next day, bed 13B is empty, that book is unmoved from the day before, and somehow, Rose knows why.

* * *

Luisa spends her morning at paediatrics, watching children run around with a great bounce in their step even though they’ve lost all their hair to chemotherapy. She watches the pain she thought they’d bear manifest in the loving looks of their parents, who watches them from afar with an unparalleled love, and an equally powerful fear. They say your parents carry your greatest burdens and especially today, she realises how luck can be measured in so many different ways and this is perhaps one of its rarest forms.

“You’re too old to be here.” It’s a boy whose voice ambushes her from behind the pillar. He can’t be any older than eight, or nine.

“Oh, I’m not a patient here.”  
“But you’re wearing the same ugly pyjamas as the rest of us,” he squints at Luisa from behind his thick spectacles. “Except much bigger,” he adds.

“I’m supposed to be on the 13th floor,” Luisa admits, grinning.  
“But you escaped.”  
“I guess you could say that.”

He settles beside Luisa and they’re both sitting at a corner of the cold hospital floor, obscured by the pillar and a spare bed. It only feels slightly less tragic because this is paediatrics and they have animals pasted on the floor, like a jungle trail. All things considered, this might be one of the happier floors in this building.

“So, who are you hiding from?”  
Luisa looks affronted by the question. “I’m not hiding from anyone.” Then as though to lend some authenticity to her reply, she adds, “adults don’t have to hide from people.”  
“Adults are always hiding. And not even the kind where they expect to be found.”

She sighs. Where should she start? The series of events that got her admitted into the hospital in the first place, or the fact that she knows noon means Rose must be at the ward right now, doing lawyerly things and just being, well, her.

And this is actually the stupid part. There’s absolutely nothing going on between them, and Luisa knows that she can’t trust anything about her when they are pumping chemicals into her body on a regular basis and when she’s wandering about the hospital in an oversized patient gown avoiding human contact. Luisa knows she would never let a patient say anything important, or decide anything proper while they are on this cocktail of drugs. Luisa knows she should be sleeping it off, and practising excuses on why she disappeared for when she eventually checks out.

Luisa knows that nothing she feels is, what she would scientifically deem as  _real_.

But instead, Luisa is curled up on the paediatrics floor, talking to a eight-year old about her life and its problems.

(Kids these days grow up far too fast. Someone should tell them that the process is irreversible and they are going to wish it were.)

“Go get me the flipboard that hangs at the end of your bed.”  
“Why?” He stares at her all prim and proper, and Luisa is pretty sure he must be the hall monitor back at school. “That’s for doctors only.”  
“Well, if that means you don’t want to know what your parents and doctors actually talk about…”

He runs there and back so fast Luisa hasn’t even pushed Rose out of her mind yet. It takes a few well-placed scribbles and post-its to explain, in drawing, what is going to happen to this little boy. She even includes a few citations on research she has read in this field of surgery.

He gives her a hug when they’re finally done.

By the time Luisa returns to the ward it’s eight and her whole day is gone, just as Rose is.

But on her bed is a collection of plays by Henrik Ibsen. A thin, softcover book with a bright orange cover, which stands out against the dull hospital sheets and the dim, dim room.

Luisa has no doubt that it has been left there for her by Rose. And when she reaches over to carefully peel it open, she finds that the book isn’t new. Its spine is broken into, and though it is well-preserved, Luisa is certain that someone, probably Rose, has been through it before.

She flips through the book, and where HEDDA GABLER starts, a name-card falls out. It’s Rose’s, and Luisa can’t help but bite her lower lip when she realises it’s still laced with Rose’s perfume.

On the back of the name card are words, so beautifully written in Rose’s handwriting. Words that are simple, but to her, somehow words that just carry so much more weight.

_I loved this play. I hope you do too._

Luisa doesn’t really sleep that night. She runs through the play once, twice, thrice. She reads it over and over, her fingers tracing the words underlined in pencil, knowing that these are the markings left by Rose, that these are the very words held dear by her. She reads through them like the both of them are reading it at the very same time.

And just like that, Luisa falls asleep to the thought that maybe, just maybe, she could be courageous too.

* * *

She wakes up at eight when the nurse warns her about running around again. It appears that her disappearance has not gone unnoticed, and they are bitter that she missed her afternoon dose. Luisa pretends to go back to sleep, drowsy, but she knows better. They’re done with her floor within an hour and a half, and Luisa disappears again.

This time, however, she makes sure to move that boring book about migrants, and place it exactly where Rose had left the book the night before.

Today, she finds her way to a small supply closet, where it’s quieter, and where she can be left alone. Even the nurses don’t find their way here, not with the ancient equipment and the expired alcohol swabs. Not even when they are looking for her.

It’s right on the strike of four when the Head Nurse makes an announcement looking for her. Looking for 13B, that is.

It takes only fifteen minutes for Rose, to find her though.

“Luisa?”

She looks up, and she beams. Rose has all her things with her, including that boring book, and the note she left therein. She says nothing, and Rose sits down beside her, the note still tightly held in her hand.

“See, now you won’t have to call me 13B like the rest of the hospital.”

“You write like a child,” Rose replies, giving her that resigned look that speaks volumes. As she takes a seat beside Luisa, she folds the paper napkin in her hand, delicately, like she’s planning to keep that little treasure map. A little treasure map Luisa drew against the night light, directions to her little hideout, and a signature she’s surprised Rose can even read.

Before Luisa realises there is a cup jelly in Rose’s left hand, and in the other, a small plastic spoon.

“I only managed to steal one though,” she admits, almost disappointed with herself.

Luisa grins.

“It’s okay, we can share.”

* * *

“So, are you a defense attorney or what?”  
“That’s not my speciality.” Rose looks down at her hands, and Luisa realises how close they are, unwittingly snuggled up against each other as the hours pass and the coolness of the metal becomes, gradually, cold.

“The firm hired me because I topped my tax class.”  
“Tax?” Luisa grimaces. “Is that even a thing you can be good at?”  
“Apparently so,” Rose lets out a laugh and Luisa can feel the air filling with her amusement. “It isn’t the most entertaining field, but everyone wants to pay less tax than their neighbour.”  
“But if you’re a tax lawyer, what are you doing with 13D? What, do you just do these poor people cases because it’s  _so_  terrible to be surrounded by perfectly-tailored white shirts all day?”

Luisa laughs, a little too loudly, at that, and runs her fingers casually down Rose’s shoulder, expecting to feel top-of-the-line cotton, but instead she feels  _electricity_. She doesn’t realise that anything is wrong, not until she doesn’t get an immediate retort, and when she looks up, she sees Rose suddenly silent, pensive, almost. Something flashes across Rose’s eyes, and Luisa immediately freezes.

(She does this a lot, you know? Screw up things that are good for her.)

But before she can say anything, Rose forces a smile - a beautiful one, as always - and replies first.

“Nah, I just like going to hospitals and randomly hanging out with patients.”

“Clearly.” Luisa shrugs, and she follows with one of those trademark beams. “I’m  _excellent_  company.” There’s smug on her face that makes her appear a lot more confident than she actually is, it’s a smug for which she has cause for practice often, and one that has taught people to see her in a way that people call  _stronger_.

(And sometimes it feels like this is the only way people know how to look at her now. Because it’s easier for them, and it really ought to be easier for her too.)

But when Rose finally looks up, when their eyes finally meet, Luisa thinks that perhaps, she’s not the only one trying so hard to be strong, that she might one day lose herself to it.

* * *

She first realised her name was going to be a burden just the day after she returned home from graduation.

The Chief of Surgery pulled her out from the tour, inviting her into his office. Without even looking at her resume, he offered her the position.

“I’m sure you’ll find that the hospital can be a great fit for you.” A pause, and then, “and your family as well, of course.”

It’s then when she understood what her father had meant he said it’d benefit them all for the business to undergo some diversification.

* * *

Rose says she can’t come to the hospital on weekends. Lawyers don’t work on weekends, she insists.

It’s just past two on Saturday when Luisa is woken up by the smell of spring rolls and fried noodles.

“No visitors on weekends, Rose.”  
“You’re hardly the one to talk about rules, Luisa.”

Rose even ordered extras for the rest of the ward. They’re making a lot of noise now, and Luisa feels like there might be a lot of vomit bags in the near future if everyone continues to eat as though this might be the only real meal they’re getting in weeks. Although, given the quality of food here, it probably is.

She’s not dressed in one of her office things today. She’s dressed in a one of those summery dresses today, and it ends just around her knees. It doesn’t look as new as any of her other clothes, but Rose doesn’t look any less beautiful.

Luisa smirks, and she picks up the box of kung pao chicken in front of her.

“How did you know I liked Chinese?”  
“That’s basically what your sweatpants smelt like.”  
“SLACKS, ROSE. THEY ARE SLACKS.”

* * *

Her wounds are healing well. Most of the swelling has gone down.

Rose doesn’t say anything as she runs her fingers across Luisa’s rough knuckles, a little amazed, and a lot hurt. Like she’s the one with scars from broken glass bottles and blurry shades of colour for memory and an uncanny ability to hurt others while hurting herself.

 _Don’t pity me,_  Luisa doesn’t say, even though that’s all she wants.

Rose presses her lips against Luisa’s bruises in the lightest way possible, and it’s possible that she has to re-learn how to breathe.

* * *

She is walking beside Luisa when an intern cat-calls at her. It’s not something Rose isn’t used to. She’d like to say otherwise, but unfortunately, respect is not something a woman easily earns in the legal industry.

Being poached by several top firms to join is one thing. Earning respect once you’re inside is a whole another.

She usually only has one of two responses. She lets it go, or she threatens with a lawsuit. Luisa, well she, handles things  _differently_.

It’s a string of Spanish words she cannot understand and Luisa cornering the intern in a corner, making wild gesticulations and yelling, and when Rose tries to intervene-

“I will handle it, Rose.”

Luisa watches the intern apologise to Rose, with a fierceness in her eyes that immediately softens when he slinks away, and Rose slips beside her.

“Hey.”  
“Getting angry is awful for my health. He should go down for malpractice.”  
“Hey.” Rose repeats, and there’s a seriousness about her voice. Luisa stops, and looks at her, suddenly terrified.

“You know you didn’t have to do that right?”

Luisa smiles in spite of herself. If only Rose knew how little self-control she had, and how much of it that took.

“But I did.”

* * *

It isn’t that she doesn’t know what it’s doing to her, or her body. It’s just that, sometimes, she just wants to disappear.

And if getting drunk and checked into a hospital with injuries from an inevitable bar fight is the way to anonymity and escape, then that’s why she does it.

Or at least that’s why she started doing it.

Now she’s never too sure if she’ll ever actually find the escape she needs.

* * *

“You’re never getting that book back, you know that, right?”  
“Are you  _really_  going to steal from a lawyer? I do know a couple of detectives here and there.”  
“Please, you’re a  _tax_  lawyer. Should I be expecting officers yelling  **U.S. TREASURY**  knocking down doors for this?” Luisa waves it in her hands triumphantly, and Rose laughs, bumping into Luisa as they walk against cold night wind, towards her car. “It’s just a book, Rose.”  
“It’s not  _just_  a book, Luisa.” Rose says, unlocking her car, and turning around to face Luisa. She quietly runs her fingers through Luisa’s hair, which is somehow never less than perfect. Her voice is impossibly soft, laced with a kind of shyness, a kind of revelation, when she finally mutters, “you and I both know that.”

* * *

It’s about a week and a half when someone finally calls. Luisa is in the middle of reinserting 13G’s needle so that it will actually properly deliver the fluids, when her phone rings. She doesn’t even need to look at the screen to know it’s Rafael. Father is on honeymoon with the latest stepmother, that’s how she managed to escape his supervision anyway.

Breathing out loudly, she lets the phone ring obnoxiously while she focuses her attention on 13G’s needle. She usually lets the nurses do these things, but she knows she can do this much better.

“Aren’t you going to pick up the call?”

It’s Rose. Sitting by 13D with a stack of paperwork he now has to fill up. The last of it for him to get his compensation, she imagines. Probably a settlement, probably not enough and probably still far more than anything he’d have expected. Today Rose is dressed in a light blue chiffon top that brings out the green in her eyes, and one of those trademark pencil skirts Luisa imagines she must have a full wardrobe of. Luisa looks up briefly, and shakes her head.

“It’s okay. Doesn’t matter.”

Before the nurses come by for their 4 o’clock rounds, Luisa manages to get the needle done. 13G sighs kind of loudly, and Luisa thinks he might have been slightly terrified that she was going to make it worse. He wouldn’t have been this worried if he knew how well she always was at labs, but that’s not something she’d want to explain to him anyway.

When she finally gets back to her bed, she realises that Rose is still staring. So she presses the little red button on her screen, throws her phone under her pillow, and leaves the ward, pulling her iv drip off its stand and stuffing it in her oversized left pocket.

* * *

The nurses hate her, she thinks. She’s been spending the last week or so running around the hospital, giving rogue advice to patients that are certainly not hers, and not being a good patient herself. They’ve called for her on the public announcement system twice, but neither being called 13B nor being called JANE DOE actually helps them identify anyone, so by now they’ve taken to leaving her pills in a little plastic cup by her bed, for when she gets tired and returns after her adventures.

Luisa sometimes thinks that someone in the hospital must know who she really is, and that’s the only reason why she gets away with things like this.

Things like breaking into the hospital roof using some bobby pins and sitting there for hours, watching the sky colour change to the coolness of the wind. Quietly, and alone.

Thinking.

(And wondering, how long she can get away with being alphabets and numbers and not being Luisa Solano.

And just how long she can get away with having Rose by her side, no questions asked.)

“You’re a doctor.”

Luisa turns around, and it’s Rose. Well, leave it up to the lawyer to solve the big mystery of the day. No prizes there.

“Doesn’t matter.”  
“You keep saying that.” She replies, and it’s - could it be - sad?

At least it isn’t disappointment. Luisa could recognise disappointment from a mile away and this isn’t that.

Rose sits beside her. On the rough gravel of the hospital rooftop, even though she’s decked out in fine corporate wear and Luisa is still wearing the oversized patient uniform.

“It’s done. isn’t it. 13D is getting discharged. That’s your pro bono for you.”  
“He is.” A pause, and almost hesitantly, Rose shifts closer. “And you, aren’t you getting discharged yet?”

As Luisa stares at an aeroplane fly across the beautiful sky, she wonders, for a moment, if it’s okay to be talking to Rose like that.

To let Rose into her little bubble of serenity without even a little bit of struggle.

(It’s a recipe for disaster, she knows. She’ll hurt her and she’ll hurt Rose and there will be no winners.)

“No, I hope not.” She sighs, and turns to look at Rose. “I’m sure they will soon, though. They never keep me for more than two weeks at a time.”

Rose frowns, and instinctively Luisa leans closer to push back a loose strand of hair. Rose doesn’t resist, and it does bring a brief smile to both of them.

“You get admitted a lot.”  
“I do.”  
“And you continue to let it happen?”  
“I’m afraid I can’t stop.”

 _I can’t stop_ , Luisa finds the words tumbling out of her mouth long before she realises its weight. It chokes a little in her throat and if she has more words for Rose it doesn’t exactly get said. Instead, she tightens her fists and starts staring into the ground like it will make the path scorch and the pain in her chest hurt less if she stares hard enough.

It’s quiet for what feels like hours when it’s probably less than five minutes.

And then she hears Rose speak again, her voice soft, gentle, and delicate. Like a feather, floating across the surface of a cloud.

“Shh, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

Rose slips her arms around Luisa in an embrace that is warm and jarring at the same time and before Luisa realises she’s leaning into Rose like her body is falling apart and Rose is the only thing holding her together.

This time, it falls quiet for hours, until the sky gets dark and Luisa is breathing a little more calmly, and Rose has fallen asleep in the little gap between Luisa’s conscience and the truth. When Luisa finally opens her eyes and looks up, she realises that, in spite of the grimy floor and the humid air, this is the most beautiful Rose has ever been.

 _This is the most beautiful Rose has ever been_ , and when Luisa leans up to kiss the tears away from her cheeks, she hopes Rose knows.


	2. you know i'm real

She’s terrified.

She knows she’ll never breathe the same way again, and she knows that every time she hears that name her feet will stop and she will freeze. She knows she’ll never think of her and not find herself drowning in waves of emotion.

And all this because, in the blink of an eye, she’s swept into her life with the force of the sea, and she’s sure - she’s absolutely sure - that it will be with the same terrifying thunder that she’ll leave.

(But you see, it’s not the leaving that terrifies her.

It’s the being  _left behind_.)

* * *

13D goes home with little fanfare, he says his obligatory goodbyes but half the ward is hooked up on some kind of drug that leaves them dazed and somewhere else.

Luisa isn’t privy to that kind of luxury, so she actually overhears a lot of the conversation regarding what medication he’s taking with him and his excitement on returning home with the payout from Rose’s work.

(But the excitement is mostly about leaving  _this place_  and returning  _home_ , whatever that means to him.)

It seems like an inevitable ending, so Luisa prepares something of a goodbye speech, and an offer for Rose to come visit her (as a friend, of course), if she ever has a case in Miami. It’s a speech she doesn’t get the opportunity to say, because Rose disappears as quickly as 13D, with the efficiency of an overworked system desperate for people to leave.

When Rose leaves the ward wordlessly, only not to return for an hour, and then two, Luisa wonders, just for a moment, if that’s that.

If goodbyes aren’t said because neither of them were brave enough to put them into words, or perhaps, because they’ve already had their goodbyes that day on the rooftop.

It’s several hours later, when she’s having a staring contest with a small bottle of cheap whiskey she’d stolen from a gift basket, that an even more terrifying thought strikes her.

Perhaps there was never anything worth saying goodbye to.

And it’s to that thought that she pulls open the cheap aluminium cap and takes a sip. She takes enough sips for her mind to wander, and she even considers for a moment, what it’d be like if they never find her.

After all, no one else knows about this place.

She realises how bad all this is when she decides it wouldn’t be too bad to disappear forever.

But then she finishes all of it and she’s still not knocked out. She finishes all of the whiskey and it’s like her liver is giving her that one last ‘fuck you’ by keeping her sober. Like her body won’t even let her leave on her own terms, when her mind is willing her to go.

And that’s when she cries. She bursts into tears, and it’s ugly, ugly sobs that reverberate around the small supply closet, and hearing it over and over again only makes her feel more lonely than ever. She cries till her throat is dry, and then she hears her name, echoing down the corridor like a ship’s whistle on its final port of call.

“Luisa, Luisa!”

She thinks that maybe that’s it. She’s hearing things; that’s how it always starts.

And then the door bursts open, and standing there by it, is Rose.

* * *

They’re both sitting on the toilet floor, and Rose is holding up her hair with one hand and gently soothing her back with the other. She’s throwing up into the toilet bowl with a veracity she wished she had for life, and the same part of her that is grateful for Rose is also embarrassed by the fact that she is seeing her in this state.

Just twenty minutes ago, she was waving her fists around and crying like a child, and Rose single-handedly dragged her to the bathroom and put her under a cold shower.

“Don’t do this, please!” Rose screamed, above Luisa’s wails. “You don’t get to do this to you and you don’t get to do this to me!”

The words are still ringing in Luisa’s head as she throws up the last of the alcohol, and everything it takes with it, including what little lunch she had, leaving her just empty.

But then when she turns around and collapses against the toilet wall, dejected, sitting beside her is Rose, who gets up only to flush the toilet, and get Luisa a mouthwash from the medicine cabinet.

Everything is almost too quiet, in that moment, and then Rose sits beside her, and holds her hand, squeezing tightly.

“I’m sorry,” Rose starts, and Luisa looks up, the weariness showing in her eyes. It’s like her body is a battlefield and she doesn’t know who won, but her spirit is still trapped under the rubble. She smiles, weakly, and Rose continues. “I’m sorry for saying all those things.”

What escapes from Luisa’s lips is a bitter laugh.

“You won’t be the first to wish they hadn’t gotten to know this mess.”

She feels Rose pull away, and she doesn’t stop her.

“Look at me.” Rose’s voice is insistent. And when she repeats those words again, Luisa gives in. Rose is kneeling beside her, and she has on the most serious expression Luisa has ever seen.

“I’m sorry for yelling at you, yes. But I’m not sorry about meeting you. And I’m not sorry about caring for you.” Rose looks straight into her eyes and Luisa can feel the words scorched into the back of her mind. “I will  _never_  be sorry for this.”

When Luisa hesitates for too long, she watches that strength in Rose’s eyes give way to disappointment, and Rose almost gets up to leave.

But then Luisa grabs at Rose’s hand and pulls her back with a force she didn’t know her body was still capable of.

And without a second word, Rose stays.

* * *

“I could have been a fellow by now. At any specialty of my choice.”  
“But you’re here.”  
“I am.”  
“Do you regret it?”  
“What?”  
“Running.”  
“Not even a little bit.”

Rose runs her fingers through Luisa’s hair, softly and slowly, and when Luisa unconsciously shivers from the cold, Rose wordlessly pulls her closer into the embrace.

“What would you have chosen?”  
A small chuckle. “Who knows?”  
“Wasn’t there something in particular you liked? Or was particularly good at?”  
This time, sadder. “Who knows?” Luisa sighs out loud with a resignation that is perhaps more telling to Rose than it is herself. “The attendings have their reasons for wanting me, and certainly not for these.”

Luisa holds up her hands, and examines them once over. For the scars and what they represent, for the dexterity and control in her fingers and how good they are with a scalpel. Oh what a symphony she could play with the strings of life, when they are not hers.

“If there’s a choice between a thousand-dollar handout, and a lottery of hundred thousand dollars, I’d be that lottery. They see me as the gamble; the off-chance to strike gold.”

The irrational decision, the  _wrong_  decision.

All the other residents pretend they don’t know this. They sidle up to her and try to be her friend when really what they want is for Luisa to not be their competitor, because they all think the Chief will give her whatever she wants, regardless of whether or not she deserves it.

And more often than not Luisa wishes that, above everything else, she actually  _knows_.

But it’s not like she helps her own cause, not when she’s sleeping with the cardio attending who is angling for a promotion she thinks Luisa can make happen, and not when she’s aimlessly floating from one department to another. They think she’s  _baiting_ , that like her father and like every single one of his trophy wives, she enjoys the power.

Power in her hands is crippling. And she has the scars to prove them, but everyone is too caught up in what they want and what they can get out of her to see.

But Rose is defiant and it’s with that attitude that she responds. “Then they are fools, and I have struck the lottery.”

* * *

When Rose manages to find time to visit Luisa everyday, they slip into a schedule that almost gives Luisa the opportunity to take it for granted. But then of course, that is not a luxury either of them can afford.

They’re bent over a yoghurt granola mix that is supposed to be healthy but is now anything but after adding a generous scoop of strawberry jam Rose only brought because Luisa was really craving it. Luisa is midway through a story about the young boy from upstairs when an awful beep sounds from Rose’s phone and without even reading the message, Rose is immediately apologetic.

“I have to go.” She puts down the spoon and it lands with a kind of dramatic thud that Luisa is sure she is making up, but Rose’s expression tells her it must be more. “I’m sorry,” she swallows, “I have no choice.”

She’s never thought it possible that Rose could ever be trapped, and somehow that thought unsettles her more than she would’ve imagined.

So she puts down the spoon and loops her arm around the already standing Rose, indicating she’ll walk her out.

“Need to go home?” She asks, as innocently as possible, but she knows her every word is laden with the inevitable disappointment of spending two hours less with Rose than she is used to. The thing about it is, that despite everything they know about each other, and despite everything they’ve been ready to share, there’s still a wealth of things it seems they are just not prepared for.

“That depends on what you call a  _home_ ,” Rose finally replies, her self-deprecating laugh resonating off the lobby walls as she pulls Luisa closer.

If the question was designed to buy her some time, it doesn’t work, because Luisa replies almost immediately. “A place you feel safe,” she replies, the answer rolling off her tongue with a surprising amount of ease.

“Well then, my dear Luisa,” Rose turns to Luisa with a small laugh, “I’m not going home.” Before Luisa can say anything Rose continues. “By that definition, I’ve not gone home for ages. It’s just a place I sleep and store my lovely clothes, silly.” But the intended humour falls flat as Luisa effortlessly sees through her façade.

“Stop doing that.” Luisa pulls Rose into a tight embrace and shakes her head softly against Rose’s shoulder. “It’s not nothing and it doesn’t become nothing just because you keep pretending it is.” When they finally peel apart, Luisa looks at Rose and tells her the one thing she wishes someone, just once, would tell her.

“You deserve better.”

But Rose looks at her with the saddest green eyes and says quite simply, “I’ll believe that when I’m actually happy.”

* * *

That night, a little tipsy and a lot reckless, Rose goes back and tells him she won’t keep doing what she does, just to pay a debt she never should have been responsible for. And when he looks up from the previous month’s paperwork with a kind of satisfied smirk, she reminds herself of what Luisa said and stands her ground.

Eventually he agrees to new terms, that she’d be rewarded significantly every time she succcessfully aids in the “legal retirement” of one of his men, and that she’d be given significantly more freedom than she’s currently accustomed to. But not  _too_  much, he doesn’t need to say, for Rose to understand. He’s had her for far too long and she knows far too much.

But after he's done, when she slips into her shower, expecting to feel triumphant, she feels anything but. Instead, she curls into a ball on the floor, hot water hitting the top of her head as she chokes on the thought that she’ll never be defined as anything more than his valuation of her, and how little he needs her to be.

* * *

She’s been doing this from before she was 18 and every single time since it has burned the same way it did the very first time.

* * *

“Do you think Hedda was eventually, you know, happy?”  
“Well, that depends on why you think she was unhappy in the first place.”

They’re opposite each other in the noisy cafeteria, enjoying a certain privacy ironically created by a curtain of noise, of people reluctantly ordering dry chicken breast and un-buttered corn.

Rose is supposed to be eating something that resembles a salad but what she really is doing is poking holes in lettuce leaves, and smiling at Luisa in a way that makes Luisa blush.

“Maybe she should have married Lovborg instead of Tesman.”  
“Maybe she shouldn’t have married either of them.” Rose’s response is quick and her voice surprisingly sharp. Bitter, almost, in a way she’s never quite known Rose to be.  
“What do you mean?”

Luisa watches Rose look down at her food, stabbing at the specks of corn somewhat half-heartedly as she waits. She waits for that opportunity to share something with Rose, she waits for that privilege of doing that.

Rose sighs really loudly before she starts speaking. And even then she looks to her salad for courage instead of meeting Luisa’s eyes. It all comes out in a rant.

“Because maybe all Hedda wanted was, was to be  _Hedda_. But she’s been pushed from being Hedda Gabler to Hedda Tesman and in the midst of all that mess it can be difficult to forget that she’s Hedda and she’s should be her own person instead of being someone else’s.”

Luisa frowns, and reaches over the table to hold Rose’s hand. It’s clear to her that there’s some kind of pain in the way she enunciates every word.

She squeezes her hand gently, and Rose finally looks up.

Her eyes are glazed over in a way that makes Luisa hurt where it shouldn’t, and Rose says so much and so little at the same time when she finally asks, “do you ever feel like you don’t know who you are anymore?”

“I do,” Luisa whispers with a nod. She can feel Rose trembling, and as scared as she is, she steadies herself.

She tells herself that she can fall apart a million times elsewhere, but today, she needs to be strong.

For Rose.

For those few seconds, it’s almost as though the noisy cafeteria falls dead quiet, just waiting.

Rose’s voice cracks when she finally speaks.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.”

* * *

Luisa sighs loudly as she replies with “I don’t want to talk about it” yet again. Across her, a woman only slightly older than her pushes up her spectacles and mirrors her sigh.

She’s been through this a hundred times, from when she was five, but it’s never actually worked. They all try different ways to get her to open up, so determined to find out what makes her tick, until they don’t.

The woman in front of her, whom she later realises is called Julie, looks at her with a kind of exasperation unique to those not yet jaded, and says finally, “I know what you’re here for. You want me to recommend that they keep you here.”

Luisa looks up from her hands for the first time that whole hour. “I do.”

“How about we talk about why you want to stay.”

And Luisa finds it surprisingly easy to talk about Rose, surprisingly easy in a way that means she doesn’t keel over and want to throw up like she does everytime she’s asked to talk about her family. At the end, while she’s closing the door behind her, Julie says with a kind of understated accomplishment, “we did good work today” and it almost makes Luisa smile.

* * *

Rose doesn’t fall apart in quite the same way as Luisa. Even at what Luisa can only guess is her worst, she pulls herself together with the kind of control Luisa can only wish she had.

“I’m sorry,” Rose whispers by way of introduction, and she slips in beside Luisa, silent and uncharacteristically small. Luisa’s eyes blink open shortly after, and she can tell that it must be pretty late from the way it is nearly pitch black in the ward, and even the moon shines a little less brightly.

Three, maybe four am, if she had to guess.

It’s quiet, and as far as she can tell, no one has woken up yet. Bending the visitation rules is one thing, breaking them is quite another.

But right now, that’s the last thing on her mind.

Instead she turns around quietly, and presses a kiss against Rose’s forehead. Rose doesn’t even open her eyes, and when Luisa pulls her into the embrace, she realises why.

(The most devastating of tears are those shed behind a curtain of silence, as though, for some reason, they just aren’t worth it.)

As Luisa whispers “it’s okay” over and over again, she feels Rose’s frame curl up uncharacteristically small in her embrace, shivering. Shivering, like it’s taking every part of her to bear even a little bit of semblance to put herself together, and not just fall apart.

Like somehow, a crack will show that Rose is nothing she’s made herself out to be, or even worse, like she’s nothing at all.

So Luisa pulls her in tight, and hopes that somehow, even if she doesn’t have the courage to tell her, Rose knows that she doesn’t have to be alone. She doesn’t have to be alone, no matter what she does and who she’s hiding inside. She doesn’t have to be alone, not while she has Luisa.

* * *

There hasn’t been a ‘no’ in Rose’s dictionary since the day his men kicked down her dormitory door and he brought her an urn with her father’s initials and an IOU which she inherited.

The day after she turned 18 she moved to an apartment of his, and not long after, pushed the urn out of her window in a fit of utter disgust.

The first time she tried to resist she had ended up in the hospital with a broken hip – “I wouldn’t touch your face, darling” – and missed two weeks of college. Since then he’s found a way of ensuring compliance by crudely, but clearly, marking his authority. She stopped resisting when she realised how absolute power makes even the clearest of words futile.

There hasn’t been a ‘no’ in Luisa’s life since the day her father realised how easy it was to lose her. Rafael had it different, he carried on his shoulders different expectations, the nature of which Luisa and Rafael often disagreed on. But she got what she wanted, and her father even went on to provide things Luisa didn’t want.

It never occurred to her that maybe he should have been around, until she was at medical school graduation and he was halfway around the world at the groundbreaking ceremony of a new hotel. Her graduation photograph was her and Rafael and the same a year later, when Rafael too graduated. She decided it didn’t matter whether it was that she failed to ask, or that she didn’t actually need him around anymore.

Back at the hotel, they’d find themselves drinking over their awful childhood, both trying too hard to laugh about it. They’d rank his many wives and they’d tried to gain credit for the worst pranks. They’d joke about wrecking their lives to get back at him, and over the next few years, surprise each other with how they had actually proceeded to do precisely that.

* * *

Rose doesn’t like talking about it and Luisa doesn’t once press. There’s one day when Rose pulls her up to the rooftop and says to her, “can you just hold me for a bit till the sun goes down?”

Luisa nods and pulls Rose into her arms, but Rose ends up falling asleep almost instantly and Luisa unceremoniously throws her phone off the roof when it keeps ringing.

Rose wakes up to the silent night and Luisa’s tender, tender warmth, and she’s grateful for those few hours even when he’s punishing her for it.

* * *

“You’re blonde,” Luisa says, out of the blue, as Rose lays on her lap. Her fingers are going through Rose’s hair with an odd kind of domesticity that Rose has never felt with any of her lovers.

“I’m a redhead now,” she jokes, a scandalised voice lacing each word. “Besides, how can someone named Rose be anything but a redhead. Doesn’t quite give off the right  _femme fatale_  vibe if I were blonde, don’t you think,” she adds, a wink in her eyes.

She winks, but really there’s a telling tremble in Rose’s voice.

" _Femme fatale_ , eh?" Luisa jokes. “So that’s what you’ve been up to.”

It’s all playful banter at first, but Luisa doesn’t quite lose Rose’s gaze when she continues, this time a little sadly, “you know, you’ll be my sweetest downfall.”

“Luisa-”

“It’s okay.”

“No, Luisa-”

“Rose, listen to me,” her voice soft, a smile finally returning to her face. “Your hair can be red, or blonde, or any other colour. I know you, and that’s all I need.”

The fearful thought that maybe Luisa has uncovered her deepest, darkest secret gives way to a look of adoration and comfort in Rose’s eyes that Luisa can dangerously recognise as softness.

“You really do know me, you know?”

“I know.”

And it is perhaps at that point, that Rose truly regrets everything she has dragged Luisa into. It’s then when Rose realises that she’s let herself be true, and that it also means she has let herself be  _weak_. And this here, this Rose, or whatever Luisa would like to remember her by, is much more than a little softness exposed at the edges. It’s as honest as she’s ever seen herself be, and she knows one day, this softness will come back to haunt her, this softness will come back to haunt them both. But for now, there is no where else Rose would rather be.

And no one else she’d rather be with.

And frankly, when it all falls apart, Rose knows that it’ll take them both down in the most glorious of wildfires.

* * *

“I have a question.” Luisa starts with no warning, her mind having been preoccupied with the issue for days. Then, a moment later, “I’m sorry, can I ask a question?”

Julie nods quietly and Luisa reverts to staring at the ceiling. She likes that Julie doesn’t take notes when she’s talking because it gives her the kind of silence she needs to pull her thoughts together without the scratchy noise of ballpoint against paper.

“What do I do when someone’s not okay?” Luisa sighs, “you know, other than refer them to shrinks, which the odds don’t seem to favour. No offence.” It’s a completely silly question, she knows, but there’s a part of Luisa that feels like she needs to know. She’s spent her whole life being the one person who’s not okay, and as incredible as it has been to meet someone who just  _gets_  it, she also knows it can’t go on like this.

If she doesn’t ask this question  _now_  she’ll forget she’s not that selfless; she’ll let them wallow together, let their emotions dance with one another to that same tragic melody, she’ll let them destroy each other just so that someone else will burn with her in that same fire.

“This is about Rose isn’t it?”  
“Does it matter?”  
“It does insofar as you’re my patient and yet you seem more concerned with helping her, than you are with yourself.”

“I just want to help her while I can.” Luisa sits up and runs her fingers through her hair before burying her face in her hands. “I won’t be here forever,” she mumbles, “and I think she has a real chance of getting out of this.”

“This?” Julie leans back in her chair and the heels of her boots clink against the coffee table.

“She has a real chance of being okay.”  
“And you?”

Luisa shakes her head in her hands and stays silent for a couple of minutes. When she finally looks up at Julie again, her eyes are red.

* * *

Rafael texts: “Father wants me to find you.”

Luisa replies: “One of these days you should tell him to find me himself.”

* * *

Her father appears on the television with his new wife - she’s young and she’s blonde and she’s reeking of his money.

In the wards, everyone is gossiping (Solanos always made good fodder for these things), and at some point in time Luisa was once so bothered she’d have these nasty, nasty fights in the hallways which always led to disciplinary action resolved by money. Charity, she called those, and the Headmaster did seem to agree.

She wants to say that it stopped bothering her years ago who her father was with, since whoever it was, it wasn’t going to be  _her mother_. She wants to say how he hurts them is not as important as the fact that he was always going to be hurting them anyway. She wants to say she’s over it.

But she’s not, and she tells Julie as much.

“Since you’re so unhappy, why do you stay?”

“Because I could never just leave him behind.”

* * *

“I want to show you something, but I don’t want you to make a big deal out of it.”

They’re in the toilet; Rose is slipping into something more comfortable before she leaves. It had only been two days ago that Rose had quietly confessed to Luisa that there was not a single part of her that liked the starchy feeling of a pressed white shirt against her skin and the way a pencil skirt shaped how others looked at her.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like being admired. It was that she didn’t like how it became her uniform - like people didn’t know how else to view her.

“Okay.”

Rose taps for her to turn around, and when she does, her eyes land on Rose’s beautiful body, her white shirt now gone, and the blue and the green against her skin is plain for all to see.

She moves up behind Rose, who is watching Luisa through the mirror, holding her breath as she expects Luisa to run. But Luisa doesn’t. Luisa loops her arms around Rose’s waist, and her fingers are as desperate as they are hesitant as Luisa breathes out Rose’s name in a tremble.

“Here,” Rose says, slowly guiding Luisa’s fingers till they caress the surface of her skin and it is Rose who sighs softly under the gentle ache of an aging bruise.

When Luisa finally looks up, it’s with tears in her eyes and an inexplicable anger in her heart that she says, “I’m sorry”.

She’s sorry for the pain that Rose has to go through, and for the demons in her that feed on it. She’s sorry Rose has to be strong despite everything, and she’s sorry that Rose has learnt to pretend that it doesn’t matter. But most of all she’s sorry that she can’t bear her pain, and that she can’t pull her away from the predicament.

She’s sorry that she’s not strong enough to make any of this better.

It’s at that point when Rose says, her voice trembling with honesty, “they don’t hurt when I’m here with you”.

And then all Luisa is sorry for is for thinking, even once, that she could ever be good for Rose.

* * *

Luisa shows Rose a photograph of her and Rafael. The photograph is grainy, probably from the salt in the air, but it’s the one photograph she takes with her everywhere. She’s twelve, and he’s still a little shorter than her, but he’s strong. Luisa tells Rose about how he carried her on his back and they ran down the private beach, laughing and laughing, only to finally collapse into the sand, still wrapped up in giggles.

It’s the first holiday they’ve taken since their father remarried. It’s the first holiday they took without him, too.

Rose looks at the photograph with such adoration and when she finally speaks, her smile genuine but her eyes sad, she says, “you have family.”

* * *

Rose counts down to him leaving; Luisa counts down to this all crumbling around them. The inevitability is both paralysing and hopeful; one day soon it will tear them apart and if Luisa doesn’t at least try to let go, it’ll tear her apart too.

* * *

It’s a Thursday when he hands her a new file, with the instructions on the project’s intended timeframe, and where she is expected to be. He’s about to fly off to one of his famous “cocktail parties”, where new products are tested and where pre-orders are placed. It’s a wild thing, she’s heard.

One day, she hopes, it’s so wild that someone feeds him something untested and the famed _Faceless_  never makes it back.

“Fly back soon,” he says, and when she only murmurs her assent, he walks closer and grabs her by the wrist. “You should know, I don’t like you too far away,” his words emphasised with his fingers pressing into her skin as he drags her closer.

She nods this time, her response clear. “Yes, of course.”

He grunts out a “very good” and then he leaves her life once more, with a promise of his eventual, and inevitably awful, return.

That afternoon as he walks out of her apartment, Rose tells herself that there are people worth fighting for, and that at least once, she should fight for herself.

(It’s in that same moment that she tells herself that when she’s better then maybe, just maybe, she could be worthy of the love Luisa gives, and capable of giving her the love she deserves.)

* * *

“Will you allow me to call you?”

She looks up from her papers and her afternoon tea and signals for Luisa to take a seat.

Sitting beside Luisa, she asks, concerned, “I didn’t think you would be leaving for at least another week.”

Luisa shakes her head. “I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“Oh, she’s flying off?”

“Yes.” Julie gently squeezes her shoulder. “The airline called to confirm her flight.”

“Seems to me like she didn’t want to have to tell you herself.”

Luisa shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Nonsense, of course it matters.”

Julie gets up and goes to her desk, reaching for her name cards. She scribbles something at the back of one, and hands it to Luisa.

“If you can afford it, please call the landline during office hours. I get to bill for those.” Luisa takes it with a small chuckle. “If not, my personal line is on the back.” Luisa turns it over and runs her fingers across the blue indented numbers, an odd sense of safety overwhelming her.

“Thank you, Julie.”  
“Anytime.”

She’s about to turn around and leave, when Julie hands her another name card. Luisa looks at her questioningly, but then Julie says with a smirk, “I know you don’t believe in shrinks, but I don’t want you giving your one to her.”

She hugs her tight, and pretends she doesn’t tear just a little when she says goodbye.

* * *

Luisa doesn’t tell her that they can’t meet again. It’s not something she would have been able to say anyway, no- not with what she really wanted and not with how Rose has made her feel alive, like she never felt alive before.

But Rose figured it out anyway.

(As she always seems to do.)

“Please know, I won’t forget you.” Rose says one night, just as they are taking their regular route to the carpark. Rose has her head bowed down, uncharacteristically refusing eye contact as Luisa answers by reaching for Rose’s hand and squeezing it gently.

Day eighteen, she tells herself, as the warmth from Rose’s fingers spread into hers.

It’s eighteen days before either of them openly admit that as fortunate as they were to cross paths, it really is good fortune that inevitably must end.

“Okay,” Luisa finally says, and along with the words, a hot puff of air escapes her lips, as though she were marking that moment forever. For the both of them.

She doesn’t say, “I won’t forget you either” because she knows she should be saying “it shouldn’t be this way, please,  _please_ , stay” but she also knows that the truth of the matter would be infinitely more harsh.

How is the truth even possible? Can she tell her that she will inevitably convince herself that she can drink the thought of Rose away, when the truth is that she will wake up from each episode wishing it were to that curtain of red hair again? Can she tell her that she will do it over and over again, as though each time meant a fresh chance to find Rose, and for Rose to find her, again?

No, she won’t let Rose pity her.

And so it’s with the greatest strength she can garner, that she wills her feet to continue moving, and that she stops her tears from falling.

“Can I kiss you?” Rose asks finally, and Luisa nods, pressing Rose against the body of the car, kissing her gently and sweetly. She kisses her in the only way she knows how, and it says  _I love you_  in a way Rose never thought she’d ever deserve.

The truth is that there’s nothing beautiful about kissing on a cold night with howling winds and messy hair. But it’s the most beautiful either of them have felt in years, with Rose gently cupping Luisa’s face with one hand and the other, holding on tight to Luisa’s hand, with its bruises and its scabs and its history.

It’s right at that moment when Rose pushes Luisa off just slightly, their foreheads pressed against one another, panting, quietly. Eventually, it is Rose who finds the courage to speak.

“Listen to me, Lu, this is important.” She swallows in a heavy pause. “Please, go home.”

Rose’s voice almost cracks, and that somehow is what really makes Luisa want to cry. She doesn’t know how to tell Rose that going home will solve nothing, that she will only be trapped in that bubble she only knows how to break out of with the alcohol. She doesn’t know how to tell Rose that while everything has changed, at the same time, nothing has. She doesn’t know how to tell her the truth when Rose looks like she’d do anything to have that excuse of a family Luisa calls home.

So she makes a promise she doesn’t want to keep when she says  _yes_  in a mumbled kiss before she runs into the darkness of the night.

It may not have been chasing gunfire in an English garden but it’s no less reckless and certainly no less lethal.

* * *

They think that she’s too young to remember. The truth is, she remembers  _everything_.

“She’s the crazy one,” the men in white had been let into the house, and fingers had been pointed at her mother accusingly, like she was a common criminal, and not her mother, not one of Miami’s most powerful women, not, well-  _her_.

Luisa was supposed to be asleep, but the commotion woke her up after all. How could it not? Her father thought it was probably best if Luisa didn’t have to see her mother taken away.

(It wasn’t quite like that the last time.)

He thought she would have kicked up a big fuss,  _made a scene_ , they call it. Actually, so did her mother.

“We all have a bit of a rebel in us, Lu.” She used to say. “Especially the brave ones.” It was a good thing, and her mother always believed she had it in her.

But as it turns out, Luisa didn’t even move. She stayed behind her heavy wooden door and peeped out of the tiny little gap, frozen, almost.

Like it just happened to her.

Like she wasn’t  _letting_  her mother go.

Luisa didn’t need to see everything to understand, she’s heard enough. The commotion, her mother screaming, then whimpering. Her mother’s voice, uncharacteristically betraying weakness, calling out for her over and over again.

Her name never quite sounded so tragic.

Then loud as thunder, her father’s voice booming above the chaos.

“It’s what you need. It’s good for you.”

As a child, Luisa never understood that. Good things were never supposed to cause this much grief, this much pain. (It was only after she grew up, and found herself hearing that line over and over again, did Luisa realise that it’s the best of things that cause the worst of pain.)

And at some point, people outgrow their battle with pain. They either win, or they lose themselves to it.

Sometimes they lose themselves to it forever.

Luisa watched as that one sentence energised her mother, turning her whimpering into a roar. She watched as, all of a sudden, her mother broke out of the confines of her room, and dashed across the hallway, her white night gown trailing behind her just slightly as she sped across the lobby.

A defiant “no” resonated across the house, a loud thud, and the commotion was over.

That was the last Luisa saw of her mother. A white cotton dress and its elegance as she had one last hurrah for herself.

The most worthy of rebellions.

She was only five.

She was only five and she remembers all of it. She remembers the day her father killed her mother.

(It was also the day she became a Solano.)

* * *

She calls Rafael later that night.

Her eyes are red and swollen and puffy but she’s sitting on the curb around the back of the hospital where they take out the trash and her eyes are dry and she has her voice under control.

It doesn’t crack and she knows exactly what to say.

Saying goodbye has never been easy, even for a person who has a knack for disappearing. Because she knows that this time, it is for good.

Because she knows that she is this close to losing herself and she won’t know how to pull herself back if she doesn’t at least try.

(If she doesn’t at least  _try_  to be brave.)

He picks up on the fifth ring, his voice sleepy. She looks to her wrist, out of instinct, but she doesn’t have a watch on. She’s still in her lousy hospital-issued pyjamas, and it almost makes her chuckle.

“Rafael, this is Luisa.”  
“Luisa?”  
“Yes. Listen to me, I need to tell you something.”  
“Just text me the address, I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.”  
“No, no. Rafael, listen to me. Please.”

She breathes out loud, and she braces herself for the click of the phone that tells her that this is over. But it doesn’t come.

“I’m not going home, Rafael.”

It sounds powerful when she says it out loud, like it’s done forever, like from that moment on, she has finally let go.

And on the other end of the line, it seems like he too, knows. Rafael’s voice perks up.

“Don’t do this, Luisa.”  
“I have to do this.”  
“Neither of us wants to stay, but we can’t just  _leave_.”  
“You’ll be okay.” Her voice cracks. “You’re not alone anymore.”

Amidst the static and the perpetual sound of sirens in the distance, she hears Rafael breathe in deep. And then when he sighs, Luisa hears pain and disbelief, rather than resignation.

“Luisa, please. Stay.”

 _Stay_  is the worst of words. It’s pleading and it’s fragility and it’s demanding.

(And oh how she would have loved for that word to slip out of Rose’s mouth.)

"I’m sorry Rafael. I don’t know how else.  _I don’t know how else to be me._ "

Rafael stops protesting, but Luisa can feel the disappointment and guilt weighing on her shoulders as he wordlessly lets her hang up. Silence which says so much, but somehow still not enough.

From her pocket, she pulls out her bottle of orange pills and then takes one.

“Last one,” she promises herself, as the tears start to fall again.

(On the other end of the line, Rafael pulls an envelope from his bedside table and sits up straight. After staring at it briefly, he finally tears it open. It takes just two seconds before he starts crying.

Beside him, Petra wakes up to the first time she’ll ever see Rafael cry. But it won’t be her last. After all, he just realised that he’s lost both his health and his sister.)

Luisa runs her fingers through her hair frustratedly as she gets up from the cold curb. It’s to blaring sirens and bursting beams of light and the tragic backdrop of the emergency department that Luisa pulls herself together again.

And as she steps out into the street with no real plan except two name cards, her savings account and an unusual amount of determination, Luisa hopes that somehow, that is bravery too.

* * *

“No.” Luisa covers her mouth with her hands, shocked, and her hair still dishevelled.

“No, no, no, no,” she repeats it over and over again as she pushes away nurses and interns amidst confusion and objection that gives way to a determination she never quite knew she was still capable of.

A strength she is only capable of, because right there, coming in right from an ambulance, with blood all over, is Rose. Rose, with her dress cut up for machines and gauze and prodding hands trying to do anything to stop the bleeding, to just-  _fix_  her.

“Rose,” she’s finally by her side and she grasps onto Rose’s hands tightly.

“Ma’am, you have to go.” A nurse tries to pry her away but even as curtains are drawn and orders are yelled, Luisa stands firm.

She sees that intern, the wolf-whistling one, reaching for the scalpel when the attending isn’t even here. When there is no need, whatsoever, to cut her up.  _She knows this_ , because back before everything, she was one of the best residents in the state. She knows this because even if she can’t be sure about anything else, she’s sure about this.

She’s allowed to be sure that this is real and this is correct, and she will not let  _this_  spiral out of her control.

She’s not letting him cut Rose up. And when he inches closer, she loses it.

Luisa loses it, and she’s yelling and she’s refusing to let this mediocre doctor touch Rose. No, not Rose. Not her Rose.

No.

She’s yelling for the best trauma attending, for the intern to be pulled off this case.

“Ma’am, you need go leave. This area is for doctors only.” The nurse yells above the noise, and Luisa just screams.

“I’m a doctor, I’m a fucking doctor.” her voice cracks, as she repeats it.

_“I’m a fucking doctor.”_

He speaks up from a lump on the floor, mouth bloodied from a punch that Luisa doesn’t remember happening. With disgust he accuses her.

“No, you’re that crazy bitch. 13B.” He looks around, proud of himself. “She’s fucking crazy!”

Luisa’s heart stills for a moment.

“I’m Dr. Luisa Solano and 13B or not, I’m still a doctor.” Her voice is firm, her eyes steely. “I’m a doctor and,” she swallows, “and you will  _not_  take that away from me. So step the fuck away from Rose.”

Someone drags them both beyond the curtain as the attending finally intervenes, realising how serious this all is.

She can’t remember most of what happened after that. She remembers a nurse bandaging her hand again, she remembers surrendering her identity to the cold Head Nurse, and she vaguely remembers hearing her father’s voice, over the phone.

And now she’s sitting in their best suite, still dressed in her bloody pyjamas, holding Rose’s hand tight.

On the chair beside her are Rose’s belongings. Her bag, Luisa’s blouse and slacks. A letter, hand-written, its ink threatening to bleed through the paper.

She wasn’t supposed to see Rose again.  
Rose was never supposed to be here.  
Rose was never supposed to get hurt.

(No one is ever supposed to get hurt, she reminds herself. But they do, don’t they? No matter how hard they try to avoid it.)

Luisa shakes her head; she ought to have seen it coming. Maybe some part of her always did. Escape, after all, is a hard-earned luxury she’s not sure she’s worthy of just yet.

If she were actually brave, she might have actually saved  _someone_.

Her mom.  
Rose.  
Her.

She might be better. But she isn’t, and maybe right now, she shouldn’t expect more.

The Head Nurse enters, and it is with a polite whisper, a deferential “Ms Solano” to which she is addressed.

Luisa  _Solano_ , just hearing it makes her sick.

“Rose will be taken care of, yes?”

A rumble of promises begin - with assurances of the best doctors and care and equipment. A ramble Luisa authoritatively ends.

“And when will Father be here?”

“In about ten minutes.”

 _Of course._  People never get the time they need, and sometimes Luisa thinks, especially her.

“I will be at the lobby by then. You can leave my things by the door.” A pause, and then she turns away to look at Rose. She smiles, instinctively, even if it’s just a little.

“He will not know about Rose.”

She doesn’t say  _don’t tell Rose about me_  because she knows that Solanos are infamous for their secrets and somehow, they never quite need to ask.

“But Miss-”

“I think I have made myself clear.”

“Yes, I understand.”

The door clicks behind her, and Luisa leans across the bed and presses a kiss against Rose’s cheek. She lingers in a way she knows will only make the hurt worse.

A kiss that lingers for longer than she can afford, because anything less will not do either of them justice.

A kiss that will remind her how, ultimately, Rose only saw her as Luisa, and that - for once - was enough.

A kiss that will say goodbye, not only to Rose, but to the Luisa she learnt still existed, after all these years.

But today, she has a debt to pay. A debt she must pay for staying a Solano.

(And for using it, to save  _her_.)

She must return to her father as Luisa. She must return, safe, as her mother didn’t.

Without the ugliness of the truth, of her addiction, or of the wreck she left behind in the souls she sought to touch.

So that, by the time she meets her father in the lobby, made up and in an expensive dress, she’s the person he recognises.

“Luisa,” he calls out to her, and that name is suddenly jarring.

She closes her eyes and under her breath, whispers a single word, laced with the paralysing weight of finality.

_Goodbye._


	3. epilogue: they don't compare to you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (you don't have to read this, but my brain went there anyway.)

“Come in.” Luisa turns in her chair, still looking for the patient’s file. “I’m sorry I’m just covering for Dr. Peters, and I can’t seem to your file, Ms-”

“Rose.  My name is Rose.” Luisa turns abruptly at that voice and when she sees her, she feels like she might have stopped breathing. It’s like it was four years ago and she’s there in that hospital again.

She’s in that same outfit, her red hair cascading down her white shirt and her body framed by a pencil skirt and tall heels.

“Luisa, I’ve finally found you.”


End file.
